It may thus be well to
make a reconnaissance; to go from place to place, surveying the field from
different angles and levels, now far, now near, that we may form a reasonable
notion of what it all portends, and how and why this crisis has come upon us—this
cataclysm of birth.
Louis Sullivan, Democracy: A Man-Search, p. 4
The future cannot be
predicted, but it can be invented.
Dennis Gabor, Inventing the Future
U.S. OFFICE OF EDUCATION, CONTRACT OE 5-16-002
February 1966
I. INTRODUCTION: APOLOGIA
FOR A MANIFESTO
A Heady Challenge
The report which follows describes an odyssey which began two years ago on Market Street in San Francisco, where the National Council of Teachers of English was holding its annual convention. Professor Erwin Steinberg, then director of Project English, asked me point-blank how I would like to make films for the U.S. Office of Education on new and promising techniques in teaching English. Inasmuch as every aspiring filmmaker is looking for angels, his question found an eager affirmative.
A Pragmatic Response
Between that heady moment
of promise in San Francisco and my first meeting with Dr. Thomas Clemens of the
U.S. Office of Education Media Dissemination Branch (sociological qualms), I
had some soberer second thoughts. True, I wanted very much to be a practicing
filmmaker. True, since I began teaching English in a seventh-grade
English-Social Studies program at East Lansing (Michigan) High School in 1952,
I had been a fiery believer in educational innovation in my chosen craft of
teaching English. But my apprenticeship—two years at the tenth and twelfth
grades at East Lansing, a summer stint at Columbia University’s Teachers
College, and a year as an instructor of freshman and sophomore English at
Trenton (New Jersey) State Teachers College—had given me many misgivings about “aids”
in general, and the films, so-called, which were being used specifically in
support of the English curriculum. I tried to express these misgivings in “The
Public Arts” department of The English Journal when I argued we needed “printed aids” (good
criticism) to the newer media which dominate the popular consciousness perhaps
more than we need (if at all) the near- and non-films which (I began to
believe) infested our curriculum.
Standards in Popular Culture
Moreover, a Fund for the
Advancement Fellowship in 1955-56 to study the popular culture industries in
New York City convinced me that our received clichés about the anti-cultural
biases of the people who run our secular media were not wholly relevant.
Indeed, as I watched Life’s Art
Editor Bernard Quint lay out a weekly issue with Managing Editor George P.
Hunt, far from feeling contempt, I began to wonder if there wasn’t really more
taste-making going on in Rockefeller Center than in most classrooms. The
standards were higher, the talents were greater, the desire to move ahead of
rising levels of American taste was unmistakable in the integrity of its
conviction. As I talked with Richard Griffith, the film curator of the Museum
of Modern Art, I discovered there were institutions outside the academic
establishment which were more coherently and intellectually imaginative than a great
many formal educational institutions. And because the Ford year off the line
allowed me, say, to watch TV director Arthur Penn give preliminary
collaborative shape to an original teleplay by Abby Mann in the off-hour quiet
of the Roselund Ballroom, I simply could never accept any longer the unearned
sense of superiority the American intellectual feels (not thinks) about the new
media.
A Paradox of Academic Ignorance
Indeed, I began to wonder
if the death of indigenous drama on American television was not as much a
result of the bad thinking we academicians brought to the rise of the new
medium as to the bad finagling of the Hollywood speculators who gave the overt
coup de grace to a promising minor
art form. Life of the new kind we disparagingly and despairingly call mass
culture, I learned that year in New York, has more in it than we ever dreamed
of in the facile philosophies of our Faculty Clubs.
In 1957-59, as holder of a
Carnegie Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, I got further
perspective on the simple-sounding task of “using the newer media to teach
English.” There I developed a new course to examine, Socratically, what the new
forces of mass production and communication had done and were doing to the
quality of American life. My essential conclusion was that the humanities in
mass education were radically out of sync with the kind of aesthetic and moral
decisions this new kind of society exacted from the common man. I pondered the
paradox that the most useful analysis of these new conditions had been
extra-academic (e.g. Gilbert Seldes’s The Seven Lively Arts (1924) and Lewis Mumford’s Technics and
Civilization (1934). More
exasperating was the observation that it wasn’t until a full generation later
that the best academicians began to give as equivalently valuable perspectives
on the new human milieu—e.g. John Kouwenhoven’s Made in America: The Arts in
Modern Civilization (1949) and
Henry Nash Smith’s Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (1950), to suggest two intramural works which have
conditioned all of my subsequent observations and speculation.
In 1959-61 I then had the
good fortune to work with one of the intellectual pioneers of an adequate
humanistic criticism of popular culture, Gilbert Seldes, in organizing the
Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, a
graduate school intended to employ the intellectual and imaginative resources
of the humanities in preparing professionals for responsible craftsmanship in
the newer media. That opportunity provided me an invaluable education in the
complexities of involving Ivy traditions with the crass realities of popular
culture.
A further perspective on
the troubling ambiguities of civilizing the newer media by using them for
humanistic purposes came in 1961-62 when I became first director of the
Institute of American Studies at the East-West Center of the University of
Hawaii. My task there was to encourage academicians to use the newer media to
interpret the meaning of American civilization to Asian nationals learning how
to modernize their countries under U.S. fellowships. Just as one never really
knows a poem until he tried to teach it, so one does not truly comprehend his
own culture until he tries to explain it to a more or less unsympathetic
foreigner.
Most recently, I have been
chairman of the English Department at Beaver College, where I have returned to
the teaching of American Literature, the subject for which my graduate training
prepared me, and which my interim commitment to the bog of mass culture
unhappily has kept me from—given the narrow biases of the departmental system.
There, ironically, in the freedom of an unbureaucraticized liberal arts
college, I have been most free to pursue the innovations my interdisciplinary
degree in American Culture (Western Reserve, 1957)—with two fields in American
Literature and one each in American philosophy, art, and history—had encouraged
me to pursue.
This thumbnail academic autobiography is not idly
prefixed to this report. I regard it as a catalog raisonné of my biases as well as my (perhaps) useful
differences. I suspect a report which goes so much against the grain of what is
in humanistic education in America
will be more understandable if not more credible if the writer suggests the
intellectual itinerary which prompted him to bring back such a minority report.
The Vices of Empiricism
For it was this academic hegira, neatly balanced (I
like to think) between the world of affairs and the realm of ideas, which is
ultimately responsible for the speculation that follows. I say ‘speculation’
advisedly, for as an undergraduate philosophy major at a Jesuit institution
(University of Detroit, 1949), with some graduate training and a continuing
interest in the philosophies of history and of science, I also believe that our
enterprise is insufficiently theoretical, even, God save the un-American
remark, excessively empirical and anti-metaphysical. This philosophical naiveté,
in fact, shows in the helter-skelter of our approach to many problems,
including using newer media to teach English. My training and my hunches make
me question rather fundamentally the ad hoc quality of most American educational innovation. Our
virtues are our vices, however; and while flying by the seats of our pants has
paid off handsomely in some sections of American life, it has, I should argue
here, failed signally and abysmally in others, in fact in our very own field
above all.
This instant vita, then, is more than preliminary attitudinizing. It
explains, for example, why I rejected the original proposal of the U.S. Office
of Education—that I simply make films spreading the good word of significant
innovations in the craft of English. In my judgment, each message demands a
particular medium or array of media, for maximum effect. This is an aesthetic
issue of the first order, and one which should interest English teachers
intrinsically, this act of judgment in deciding which manner most suits the
matter at hand. I agreed, then, to address myself precisely to the problem of
which media were right for which messages under certain circumstances.
A Multi-Media Report
This “report,” then, may
appear strange in its form as well as in its contents. Since its rationale was
the quest for ways of accelerating innovation within the craft of English
teaching, it is appropriate that is should include new, or at least underused,
ways of reporting. Hence, appended are two radio series, “Talking Sense” (13
fifteen-minute interviews recorded at the Ninth International Conference on
General Semantics), and “Literacy 1970” (13 fifteen-minute conversations with
leading policymakers in English); both series have been presented to the
National Educational Radio Network (NER) with the expressed hope that such
series can become a pattern for NCTE-NER collaboration in the future. This
report also includes the raw materials for sound filmstrips and films
(transparencies, tape, and footage) on two critical problems—teaching the
disadvantaged in primary schools and teaching generative rhetoric in high
school. Preliminary screening of those materials by U.S. Office of Education
officials in Washington makes me hopeful that funds will be given to finish
producing these teaching materials and that they will become prototypes for
series.
An Idea Bank for English
Through a series of
questionnaires to state education departments and a mailing list of opinion
leaders in the National Council of Teachers of English, we have identified a
group of teachers like Thelma Hutchins teaching Detroit’s disadvantaged at the
primary level and Russel Hill teaching generative rhetoric at the secondary.
Their idealism and their styles need to be known in the profession, both to
teachers already at work through national conventions, local conferences, and
departmental meetings, and through teacher education courses. We hope the
Hutchins and Hill projects will be promptly approved so that we go back to our
Idea Bank and get more fresh ideas circulating in our craft through
photoessays, filmstrips, 8-millimeter film loops, and 16-milimeter sound
movies. I would suggest also that we not limit circulation to educational
media. Just as English teachers begin to realize that the most “educational”
films are sometimes showing at the local theatre or on television, so our story
of educational innovation increasingly interests the public at large.
Long Range / Short Range
In this report I have tried
to do two different but related things: to dig for reasons for the
unsatisfactory response of the humanist to mass education and communication;
and to suggest a few very specific ways that the humanist can begin to use mass
communication to help solve the problems of mass education. Both perspectives
are essential. The first is long-range; the second, immediate. Without the
former satisfactorily analyzed, we shall never establish a wiser relationship
between mass education and communication; without the latter we shall never
really have confidence in mass communication as a legitimate part of the
humanistic enterprise.
I have been in the
humanists’ orbit long enough to know the risks I take in pushing candor to the
limits in this report. On the one hand, I know that the educator-audio visual
group will find unconvincing my conviction that only really serious art, firmly
confronted, can unleash the human energies needed to extricate us from a
depressing array of morasses. On the other, I know that the humanists’
century-long sneer-in at mass communication ill disposes them to see in the
media as art authentic solutions to frustrating educational dilemmas.
I’m sorry. That’s the way
it looks to me: the breach between the sentimentalists who run things in
America and the predetermined idealists who feel we’re already too ruined to
worry is exactly the cleavage this essay proposes to diagnose. Had I not the
precedent of the irrelevance of the 17th-Century British university
intellectuals as well as the firm conviction that America has become a
middle-class ancien regime run
by what C. Wright Mills called crackpot realists, I should not risk the hubris
this essay seems to imply. So be it. This is the way I see it.
Beyond Bureaucratese
I have written this report
as a personal essay as an experiment in bureaucratic communication. Having been
so appalled at the newspeakishness of bureaucratese, I now run the risk of
seeming impertinent. Others perhaps will find a happier medium than either. My
only regret is that resisting committee-like diction tends to obscure the
contribution of John Bigby to the report. A former mass-media student of mine at
the University of Santa Rosa (California) for several years, thus possessing a
rare combination, solid training in the liberal arts with an adventurous
approach to mass communication. He has been indispensable every step of the
way. And Judith Quigg showed in her work as project secretary that the more
responsibility one give undergraduates, the more they relish taking, a
phenomenon our educational routines don’t take nearly enough note of. I should
also like to thank the administration of Beaver College, especially Dean
Margaret LeClair, for extending the greatest latitude to us in the execution of
our project.
Patrick
D. Hazard
30 Août 1965
Place de Fontenoy
UNESCO
N.B. Part II, “Strategy,”
is possibly too ambitious an effort to explain for myself and other English
teachers why the humanities are so estranged from mass society and mass
education. There is so little of this kind of speculation that everyone ought
at least to try to define the issues as I have here. The naturally skeptical
are advised to begin with Part III, “Tactics,” which is concerned with setting
priorities in a war on aesthetic poverty. Part IV, “Logistics,” tries to
anticipate road blocks and practical difficulties.
II. STRATEGY: THE
BATTLEFIELD AS (NOT OFTEN) SEEN FROM AN IVORY TOWER
Humanist scholars have been
accused of being overly genteel, contemptuous of popular culture, snobbish and
anti-democratic after the fashion of their aristocratic Renaissance
progenitors, backward looking, hostile to the present, fearful of the future,
ignorantly petulant about science, technology, and the Industrial Revolution—“natural
Luddites.” “It is a sad thought indeed that our civilization has not produce a New
Vision,” a modern technologist
complains, “which could guide us into the new ‘Golden Age’ which has now become
physically possible, but only physically…Who is responsible for this
tragi-comedy of Man frustrated by success?…Who has left Mankind without a
vision? The predictable part of the future may be a job for electronic predictable,
which is largely a matter of free human choice, is not the business of the
machines, nor of scientists…but it ought to be, as it was in the great epochs
of the past, the prerogative of the inspired humanists.” (Dennis Gabor, “Inventing
the Future,” Encounter, May
1960, p. 15.)
Scholars in the
humanities may modestly reject the suggestion that they can ever be the
inspired prophets of a new age. But their scholarship is essential to enable us
to distinguish the inspired prophets from the fanatical Pied Pipers.
Richard Schlatter, general editor, The Princeton
Studies:
Humanistic
Scholarship in America, in Walter Sutton,
Modern
American Criticism
The Arts are for all,
like the bluebells, and not for the few. They should become, in some form or
another, common in an uncommon way, in the home, in the school, in the church,
in the street, and in the parks where man sits to think and look around. They
must be brought among the people so that man may become familiar with them, for
familiarity breeds, not contempt, but a liking.
Sean O’Casey, “The Arts Among the Multitude”
No comments:
Post a Comment